The reality is that people lie to themselves, and to others. Indeed, it's been estimated that the average person lies three times in every ten minutes of conversation. The problem that this lack of inherent honesty poses for those trying to evaluate the skills, nature, knowledge and veracity of another person therefore becomes of fundamental concern to a host of parties, ranging from employers to people evaluating the self-presentation of potential romantic partners or those testifying or otherwise involved in legal matters. Moreover, even when lying is not the issue, understanding the emotional dimension that breakthroughs in brain science have recently documented as crucial to people's decision-making and behavior is difficult, at best, to grasp through verbal input alone. That's because human beings verbal abilities reside in the conscious, rational part of the brain, whereas the older, more subconscious sensory and emotional parts of the brain have “first mover” advantage in people's thought process and therefore often play a dominate role in how people act. Because people don't think their feelings, they feel them, the general need arises to find a solution to the difficulties inherent in relying on the evaluation of words alone to convey meaning and motives in a reliable, insightful manner.
For instance, consider the situation of a company trying to choose which worker to hire for a new job opening. Research indicates that the selection process among job applicants has decidedly checkered results. Even the best measures, like a general mental ability test, a work sample test, and/or integrity tests have been found to be generally no more than 40% to 50% accurate in predicting a choice that proves to work out well once the person gets hired. Considering that turn-over caused by poor personnel selection can cost a company 2 to 7 times an employee's annual salary once lost training costs and other factors are taken into account, clearly companies and all organizations in general would like to improve their odds of choosing suitable personnel.
Moreover, even if the person hired proves to be adequate for the position in functional terms, with a bias toward cognitive ability, the reality is that advances in brain science as well as ever more sophisticated approaches to evaluating, training and promoting personnel for new, often supervisory roles within a company now look to evaluating emotional intelligence (EQ) and potential as well. After all, whether it involves supervising workers or interacting with vendors, business partners, or outside parties like the press, investors and regulators, people skills matter. Therefore, understanding the emotional profile, i.e., the emotional tendencies, and emotionally-fueled attitudes and values of people ranging from in-field supervisors to senior executives, can be of benefit in determining employee's career paths, needs for training, and the like. Unfortunately, at present, instruments like interviews or questionnaires rely on assessing the emotional profile and other qualities of an individual through rationally oriented, cognitively filtered means that emphasize formulating thoughts in written or oral form.
Another sample instance where relying on written or oral input alone to evaluate another person's personality type, behavioral tendencies, credibility, motivations and other such insights can prove to be problematic is in trying to assess potential romantic partners. Traditionally, people meeting one another did so in person or through mutual contacts like family members or friends. But in recent years, changes in society ranging from the frequency of moves to new locations, the anonymity of modern life, and the emergence of the internet have combined to make internet dating services, matchmaker dating services, and the like, a prevalent set of options for people looking to enrich their personal life through meeting others that they might date, marry or cultivate as special friends. At present, most of these dating services that have arisen hope to match people based on their submission of answers to build a profile that purports to identify their interests, habits, personality type, emotional make-up, and so forth. Whether that input is reliable, however, remains a serious issue as clearly people can be readily inspired to enhance their strengths and mitigate blemishes that might stand in the way of their securing an unsuspecting partner.
Yet another sample instance where the current reliance on verbal or written self-presentation alone poses a problem involves trying to assess people's self-presentation in courtroom settings. At present, lawyers and their clients rely first and foremost on the oral and written statements of witnesses, defendants, prospective jury members, and members of a mock or shadow jury that a law firm may use to test its lines of argumentation in order to assess the relevancy, credibility of people's testimony or view points. At times, lawyers may certainly seek to supplement those oral or written statements with attempts to read the “body language” of people. But given research that indicates that even the best detectors of lying—secret service agents, followed by psychologists—are at no better than chance levels of detecting deception, certainly a means of evaluating the veracity of people's statements, knowledge, biases, etc., would be hugely beneficial in guarding against errors in strategies formulated based on the slippery medium of language alone.
While the above instances by no means exhaust the range of issues the various embodiments of the present disclosure can be applied against, they do represent instructive instances where the study of facial muscle activity and expressions could address an outstanding problem. At the same time, opportunities such as being able to evaluate the emotional content of human-interest video posted to the internet to evaluate its content more adroitly, or of being able to evaluate the emotional content of video of people shopping in a store in order to provide better customer service for them are among other possibilities.
Standardized methods already exist to assess an individual's personality. For example, at present, job applicants whose personality is being assessed are most likely to be given a written exam that reflects either the Myers-Brigg 4-factor model of personality type or else the now more critically acclaimed Big Five Factor model of personality type, sometimes known as McCrae and Costa, in honor of two of its most notable psychologist developers. The Big Five Factor model is described in Mathews, G., Deary, I., and Whiteman, M., Personality Traits, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., (2003), Wiggins, J., editor, The Five-Factor Model of Personality, Guilford Press, New York City (1996), McCrae, R., Costa, P., Personality in Adulthood: A Five-Factor Theory Perspective, Guilford Press, New York City (2003), and specifically in relation to evaluating personnel, in Howard, P. and Howard, J., The Owner's Manual for Personality at Work, Bard Press, Austin, Tex. (2001), each of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein. However, despite Howard's work in evaluating personnel, the reality is that the Big Five Model for personality types can also be applied to assessing a potential romantic partner among a range of other applicants, casting for movies, to determine a child's personality type to ensure a compatible tutor or best practices for educational purposes, which player to draft to join a team sport like the NBA or NFL, etc. The Big Five Factor model is sometimes referred to by the acronym of OCEAN because it rests on the conclusion that the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (or emotional stability) form the basis of people's personalities.
Additionally, a new field that blends psychology, neuro-biology and economics called Behavioral Economics has recently emerged that could prove useful. This field is premised on the belief, aided by breakthroughs in brain science, that people are predominantly emotional decision-makers. Eliciting answers to questions based on the key principles of Behavioral Economics, such as loss aversion, conformity, fairness bias, etc., provides the additional benefit of zeroing in on the emotional dimension of how personnel performs on the job, or how much a person in general is susceptible to the biases that this new field of economics zeroes in on, an area that the traditional, rational, cognitively filtered approaches to assessing personnel have generally either ignored or been unable to capture other than through written and verbal, cognitively filtered means. Prominent works in the field of Behavioral Economics include Wilkinson, N., An Introduction to Behavioral Economics, Palgrave, London, U.K. (2008), Ariely, D., Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, HarperCollins, New York City (2008), and Thaler, R., Sunstein, C., Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. (2008), each of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein.
Whether in regard to Myers-Briggs, The Big Five Factor model, Behavioral Economics or some other such model for assessing personality type, the array of testing methods in practice all generally rely on tests with written self-assessment scoring, buttressed at times by additional assessments from individuals with presumably good, intimate knowledge of the person subject to testing, or third parties. Because of the susceptibility of self-reporting to willful or unconscious deception, a more reliable method is sought for capturing an understanding of how the person fits that particular model. To date, the few attempts to use psycho-physiological methods to gauge personality type and link it to the Big Five Model, for example, have involved other techniques like electroencephalography (EEG), heart rate, sweat gland activity or functional brain imaging. These approaches suffer from requiring the use of electrodes or other invasive monitors and also have not attempted more than typically one or two of the five trait dimensions that make up the Big Five Model, exploring traits like extraversion or at times neuroticism, without attempting to be comprehensive in finding psycho-physiological correlates for all of the five traits.
Thus, there exists a need in the art for a better way to assess non-verbal language to gain a better understanding of people's personality type, behavioral tendencies, credibility, motivations and other such insights.